A plan to power a lunar colony solely through solar energy without energy storage

NASA and a number of other different nationwide space businesses have lately revived their lunar colonization packages. One of many key elements that must be solved is learn how to energy such a colony. Can uninterrupted solar energy feasibly be realized with out vitality storage? On Earth, offering 100% of electrical energy demand 100% of the time solely from renewables, however with out vitality storage, is unfeasible.

This Earth-bound mindset has been challenged lately by a paradigm shift developed by Ben-Gurion College’s Prof. Jeffrey Gordon, which he was invited to current to NASA in late August. His thought was printed earlier this yr in Renewable Power.

On the moon, solar is the only obtainable renewable useful resource. The overriding problem is to utterly provide the principle vitality client: factories that have to repeatedly (24/7, three hundred and sixty five days a yr) produce 1000’s of tons of oxygen (O₂) per yr from the lunar soil, for rocket propellant, orbiting satellite refueling and human sustenance. A big a part of the problem derives from any location on the moon on common spending half of the lunar rotational interval of 29.5 days in the dead of night.

In his paper, Gordon paperwork a possible technique the place uninterrupted electrical energy could be produced by photovoltaic (PV) arrays put in round a 360° latitudinal ring near (however not at) a lunar pole, with transmission traces put in to the O₂ crops for which there would then be substantial distant siting flexibility.

“My resolution has a selected mass far beneath all options thus far, particularly, document low kg/kW, a key determine of advantage for inexpensive and possible lunar installations, with launch and set up prices presently exceeding $1,000,000/kg. Our new technique is greater than an element of 100 higher than solar with battery storage. It’s also not less than an element of 6 superior to the answer now being contemplated by NASA of nuclear reactors driving standard generators and turbines.”

“I used to be invited to current my findings at NASA’s headquarters for solar power in space in August on the Glenn Analysis Middle in Cleveland, Ohio. NASA scientists expressed a preparedness to rethink the plan to energy lunar colonies with nuclear vitality as a substitute of solar vitality,” says Gordon.

The idea exploits the distinctive mixture of (a) the absence of a lunar environment, (b) the near-zero tilt of the moon’s polar axis with respect to the ecliptic aircraft, (c) lunar situations being amenable to low-mass cheap transmission lines, and (d) a lunar diameter far smaller than that of Earth.